Supercomputer

Scientists will use one of the world's fastest computers to study everything from tornadoes to traffic at a new supercomputer center opened here last week. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, uses an $11-million Cray X-MP computer, which contains 393,000 computer chips and can operate about 10,000 times faster than an ordinary personal computer.

Alliant, formed by ex-Data General executives, is the first to introduce a new category of powerful but relatively affordable computers for heavy-duty scientific work. The Acton, Mass., firm claims that its FX/1 and FX/8 computers--which cost $132,000 to $1 million--outperform machines costing more than twice as much.

NASA said Friday it will make one of the world's most powerful supercomputers available to a national network of researchers in aerospace and other fields. The supercomputer, capable of 250 million computations per second, will be essential to the design and development of the space agency's so-called aerospace plane, a high-speed, reusable spacecraft planned for the mid-1990s and beyond, officials said.

IBM Corp. said it will spend $100 million to develop a supercomputer that's 500 times faster than current models. The "Blue Gene" computer will process more than 1,000 trillion calculations per second, 2 million times faster than a personal computer. That's 1,000 times more powerful than "Deep Blue," which beat chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. The machine is designed to help scientists understand genes and come up with cures for diseases.

IBM Corp. said it's providing a new class of low-cost supercomputer that uses the Linux alternative operating system, allowing researchers and developers access to computational power they previously could not afford. The National Computational Science Alliance, made up of 50 academic, government and research partners, said it would use the system of IBM computers as a part of its effort to create a new, highly sophisticated computer network for research.

Legendary computer designer Seymour Cray's attempt to revolutionize the way that the world's most powerful computers are built received a stunning setback Monday when the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory canceled a $30-million order for the first Cray-3 computer from Cray Computer Corp. Although the finished system was not scheduled for delivery until 1992, Lawrence Livermore said in a statement that because Cray Computer had missed a Dec.

The world's most advanced supercomputer, now undergoing a test at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., represents a triumph of technological vision and entrepreneurial daring. But it may not represent a commercial triumph. And thereby hangs a tale of a man and his vision, but also of the fast-changing marketplace in supercomputers and every other business today.

It's not exactly going to be Hollywood's "lights, camera, action," but the San Diego Supercomputer Center is getting into the movie-making business. Within weeks, the center will help scientists at the Research Institute of the Scripps Clinic transform the complex structure of the polio virus into a "movie." The effort could help drug manufacturers create a safer vaccine for the virus that still afflicts hundreds of thousands of people each year.

The UC San Diego Supercomputer Center is installing a new, $25-million Cray supercomputer, making the La Jolla-based institution the first west of the Mississippi River to receive the nation's most powerful computer. The computer, a Cray Research Y-MP8/864 that was delivered Monday, will replace a Cray X-MP48 that was installed at the center when it opened in 1986. The Y-MP model boasts eight times the memory and three times the computational power of the old model.